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"I tend to… cultivate some small area like that fairly
intensively for a while and then perhaps just simply drop it and do
something else altogether. The same thing is happening at the moment
with what I call my Instamatic Poems. I began a while ago by writing short poems which
were directly about events which I had either read about or seen in newspapers
or on television. So it's a poetry which is very closely related to real
life in that sense, but I gave myself the kind of restriction that the
poem must be presented in such a way as to give a visual picture of this
event, whatever it was, as if somebody had been there with an Instamatic
camera and had just very quickly snapped it…"

Nothing Not
Giving Messages (Polygon, 1990), p.26-7

The poems' titles comprise a place-name and date, for example 'London
November 1971'. The dates range from June 1970 to June 1972. The first
six poems all share the same date, 5 March 1971; the remainder are dated
only by month and year.

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Instamatic Poems

"I tend to… cultivate some small area like that fairly intensively
for a while and then perhaps just simply drop it and do something else
altogether. The same thing is happening at the moment with what I call
my Instamatic Poems… "